RPG: Five Last-Minute Horror Games to Play As A Halloween One-Shot
It’s time to plan your Halloween horror one-shot. And these five tabletop RPG systems may just be the perfect way to scare your players.
Halloween is… tomorrow. And okay, it may be a little late to get a new game for a spooky one-shot game. I’d like to think that you saw our last post featuring horror games and started planning how to terrorize your players. But if not, maybe it’s not too late to pick up one of these. Or, honestly, there’s no reason for the spooky season to end with Halloween. Plan an entire horror campaign for your players starting in early November.
Bluebeard’s Bride
Mixing horror and tragedy, Bluebeard’s Bride is a game about a young bride to a powerful man with a blue beard. She is invited to explore every room in her house except one. But the mystery may be too juicy and the other clues about what Bluebeard could be hiding may literally haunt all of the other rooms. Will you open the last door, or let Bluebeard keep his secrets?
Fate of Cthulhu
Fate of Cthulhu updates the genre and simplifies the gameplay experience with the generic and customizable FATE system. This game also uses your fear against you—as any eldritch horror-style game should. But it’s also a little more in tune with a gamer in 2025. Plus, there’s a Terminator-esque time-travel aspect.
Dread
If you’re looking for a game to run as a quick one-shot for Halloween, Dread is easily one of my favorite quick systems out there. The book is really thin (coming in at under 170 pages) and the system couldn’t be simpler. You come up with your character, stack up a block tower (like Jenga), and pull blocks out whenever your character wants to do something that would be dice-rolling-worthy in other systems. If you knock the tower down, bad stuff happens. Good luck!
Mörk Borg
If you’re looking for a little less classic horror, and a little more ‘the general vibe of death metal’ Mork Borg is a wild and very stylistically cool game. This is another pretty simple system with a light- but not quite Jenga-tower light- set of rules and a setup where the DM may never even need to roll. But what it does have is a full, unique, and very dark world. This is a sandbox to play in, like few others. But it’s a sandbox really worth playing in.
Monster of the Week
Using the Powered by the Apocalypse system, Monster of the Week is a more fun and campy approach to monster attacks and scares. Players take on the roles of high school students, monster hunters, or government agents in a world where monsters are real and they need to be dealt with before anyone gets hurt. Games can have a seriously creepy feeling. But you can also go a little more Buffy with it.
Oh hey! BoLS might make a little dolla-dolla if you decide to buy these items. We need that money to buy extra nightlights!
